Satellite images have been released showing that the catastrophic floods in Nepal and China's Tibet Autonomous Region were caused by a glacier collapse.

Comparing satellite photos of mountain peaks along the Nepal-China border taken before and after the massive flood clearly reveals sheared-off summit cross-sections to the naked eye.

According to Bloomberg, geologists analyzed the satellite images and found that bedrock beneath the glacier near the flood-affected area collapsed, sweeping the glacier down and sending a torrent of rocks and ice plunging into the valley.

Dan Shugar, an associate professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada, analyzed that a massive rockslide involving a portion of the glacier appears to have occurred.

He explained that a large volume of the glacier located at an altitude of about 5,200 meters broke off, damming the Lende Khola River—a tributary of the Bhotekoshi River—causing water to pool rapidly before eventually cascading downstream.

Christine Gautier, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, said that satellite photos of the lower Lende Khola River show the river filled with mud and other sediment, causing it to widen and the water color to change from green to brown.

She added that as a result, villages along the lower riverbanks covered in mud appear as brown zones in the satellite imagery.

Some voices are pointing to global warming as the underlying cause of this massive flood.

Alton Byers, a senior research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States, pointed out that all indicators point to the effects of global warming trends, calling it one of the largest glacier-related floods in history, triggered as permafrost—which had firmly supported high-altitude rocks and glaciers for thousands of years—weakened.

The death toll from this massive flood in Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region currently stands at 472, with a total of 1,535 people reported missing.

(Reported by Park Se-won, Video Editing by Kim Na-on, Design by Sumin Lee, Produced by SBS Digital News)